… In a cold day of January it took place in Washington DC the Georgetown-IBM experiment, the first and most influential demonstration of automatic translation performed throughout the history. Developed jointly by the University of Georgetown and IBM, the experiment implied the automatic translation of more than 60 sentences from Russian into English. The sentences were chosen precisely; there was no syntactic analysis, which could manage to identify the sentence structure. The approach was mainly lexicographic, based on dictionaries in which a certain word had a link to some particular rules.

That episode was a success. Story has it that the level of euphoria amongst the researchers was such that it was stated that within three or five years the problem of the automatic translation would be solved… That was more than 60 years ago and the language problem –the comprehension and generation of messages by the machine- is still pending. Probably this is the last frontier which separates the human intelligence from the artificial intelligence.

Do you think it’s still the distant future the day in which an army be consisted of just automata, each of them knowing what to do in every moment and what its final target is? Or a fire brigade of robots –not fearing the fire, which can perfectly move inside a building in flames in order to rescue the likely survivors? Or a squad of automata divers who can dive up to a human-impossible depth in order to set telecommunications submarine cables, to fix oil rigs to the seabed, or to rescue and refloat a ship in a completely autonomous way?